You can always check out Amazon’s Limited promotional freebies list. It’s dominated by the Harlequin freebies but there are generally new ones every other week or so.

From Hachette. This promotional pricing should be at most etailers.

TAMED BY A LAIRD by Amanda Scott. Regularly priced at 6.99, now 1.99 for July.

BORDER MOONLIGHT by Amanda Scott. Regularly priced at 6.99, now 1.99 for July.

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From reader, Gianisa, comes the following warning regarding nook books and the Mac OS update:

The new Mac OS X updates kill the B&N Ereader software. This wouldn’t be a problem except that recently B&N set up their Ebooks so that they can only be read by the proprietary B&N Ereader. If your operating system is any version of 10.5, then the B&N Ereader simply won’t open any of the Ebooks. The epub format (the book file ends in .epub) does not display content at all in the B&N Ereader. If it does open, it simply says “Page 0″ and there is nothing else.

Note that B&N will NOT give you a refund if you download an Ebook, but of course you need to download the Ebook to find the problem with their software. They know about the problem but they are not announcing it. I spent about 15 minutes digging around their website before I found any information about this at all, and that was in the technical support forums where there were several people talking about the exact same problem.

The only solution that I have found is to call up their customer service line and talk to somebody until they agree to send you a copy of the ebook in .pdb format instead of .epub. Also note that the customer service guy I talked to told me that it would take more than 24 hours to get the copy to me in my email and it’s been 2 days and I haven’t received it yet. I have been emailing with the customer service people and they have told me that they can’t handle it over email and I need to call in person (good thing I already did that). I told the customer service people, if I walked into a B&N store and bought and book and walked outside and found that it was 300 blank pages, I would be able to walk back inside and return it. But they do not allow the same for Ebooks.

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Rebbie Macintyre summarizes advice that Donald Maass (agent) gave on making the dark protagonist appealing to the reader. It sounded similar to Barry Eisler’s post about the difficult protagonist. Essentially, you have to make some part of the dark/difficult protagonist heroic, either by self awareness or by making everyone around the protag “worse”. Or a combination.

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Woot.com is a discount site which hosts one sale per day. Woot was purchased by Amazon last week and the next day, to celebrate the sale, Woot’ed Amazon Kindles at $149.99. In nine hours, Woot sold nearly 5000 Kindles. This led to an AP article about the Woot sale to Amazon. The AP used content from the Woot blog but didn’t ask for permission. Why is this a big deal? Because the AP instituted a new policy charging bloggers for use of any article (free use doesn’t exist in AP’s mind). Woot gently points out AP’s total hypocrisy:

Just to be fair about this, we've used your very own pricing scheme to calculate how much you owe us. By looking through the link above, and comparing your post with our original letter, we've figured you owe us roughly $17.50 for the content you borrowed from our blog post, which, by the way, we worked very very hard to create. But, hey. We're all friends here. And invoicing is such a hassle in today's paperless society, are we right? How about this: instead of cutting us a check for the web content you liberated from our site, all you'll need to do is show us your email receipt from today's two pack of Sennheiser MX400 In-Ear Headphones, and we'll call it even.

Woot, if I didn’t love you already, this would make me more amorous than a virgin in an HP novel.

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Slate columnist Jan Swafford says that ebooks can never replace “real books” which, as Robin pointed out, begs the question whether authors who use solely the computer for drafting and redrafting can be deemed real authors. Swafford uses Marshall McLuhan as the basis for the thesis that editing on paper will always be superior to editing on screen and thus real books have some kind of superiority.

Reader LisaCharlotte shared this article with me. I think Swafford is correct that digital consumption is probably different than paper consumption but I’m unsure whether the latter is superior.

The best form of proofreading isn’t based on paper, though, it’s based on pure human effort. When I was in law review, every article was edited more than once by more than one person. Final proofing was done in a two person team. One person would read aloud, using knocks on the table to denote punctuation and so forth. The other person would read along silently, ensuring that what was read aloud matched the content on the page. This type of proofing doesn’t require a printed out copy. It just requires a readable copy. Oral reading of piece can help the editing process quite a bit.

My point is that editing, proofing, consumption of text is variable and may be very dependent on how the writer/editor/etc has been trained.

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Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty.
You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

22 Comments

I really don’t think BN understands the digital world at all. I find it so frustrating that you can buy something online, but that they have no email customer service. Oh, you can email them, but they only send you the same canned response that your problem would be better served by calling one of their reps.

If you sell digital content and take digital money, I think you should be able to communicate via the internet as well.

I couldn’t believe the Swofford article. First, he conflates writing the book with reading it. Second, I don’t know anyone (and I know some real Luddites) who does everything through paper. Third, Swofford clearly doesn’t ever write with anyone else, or he’d know that “track changes” is Microsoft’s greatest gift to the collaborative process.

I’m revising a book manuscript right now (social science research). Most of the time, I have the following in front of me:
(1) Mac running Scrivener with chapter draft file open
(2) Notepad with revised outline to check against, scribbled notes, etc.
(3) Sony Daily Reader with pdfs of articles to quote from
(4) relevant print book sources
(5) hard copy of previous draft (hugely marked up)

Your law review proofing practice reminds me of data entry. When I was building a dataset from diverse print and electronic sources, one person would enter the data into a spreadsheet, another person would check it, and then for the third check, two people would sit and read the data to each other (one with the spreadsheet, the other with the source material)And we still wound up with a few errors.

I check inkmesh.com for free ebooks. I also follow inkmesh on twitter. I know there are other ebook search sites, just can remember them off hand.

I loved the Woot response to the AP. Good for them. If you need a good chuckle, check out their blog, even if you aren’t interested in the product of the day. Woot is a hoot.

I see no difference between print published and epublished in long narratives. None. Someone has smoke blowing up his/her skirt. It’s the content, not the device.

It’s a shame B&N is having such trouble both in software and support, Customer Service. Kobo is fabulous with customer service and considering the size of company, etc. they seem much more customer oriented. Amazon’s customer service is also great. Kindle and the apps just plain work. B&N really needs to get their act together.

I thought I’d mention Meg Benjamin’s latest Koenigsberg book was released today. Am looking forward to reading this one.

I write and edit on my computer, but then I use this amazing device called a printer. A printer takes the squiggly lines from my computer and magics them onto a piece of paper. Crazy! Then, I edit using that voodoo-paper. I now share my fantastical knowledge with you lucky readers, so that we can all be real writers.

I write and edit on my computer, but then I use this amazing device called a printer. A printer takes the squiggly lines from my computer and magics them onto a piece of paper. Crazy! Then, I edit using that voodoo-paper. I now share my fantastical knowledge with you lucky readers, so that we can all be real writers.

Is this “voodoo-paper” anything like The Doctor’s psychic paper? Because that stuff is amazing. :-)

It would be nice, in the future, to note such “freebie” offers that are Kindle (or other platform) exclusive.

Publishers are, of course, free to make any sort of promotional deals they like.

However, I do notice those that tie their “free” books to particular retailers — especially to those that already have shown an inclination to use their near-monopoly to screw over both publishers and readers.

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